Column: Thoreau and the lichens

MORNING SENTINEL • March 10, 2021

Henry David Thoreau spent hours pretty much every day observing nature in its smallest details. Then he’d go home and write up the day’s findings in his journals. So I was poking around in these journals during some gray days awhile back when I noticed a strange phrase repeated in a number of places. “It is a lichen day.” But what is “a lichen day”? A good lichen day is a moist day, when the lichens are actively photosynthesizing and their colors and textures are on full display, edifying the eyes. If he’d lived a few more years to find out the biological truth about lichens, Thoreau would no doubt have found it profoundly illuminating. He was among the original naturalists to think of the whole Earth, not just his own woods, as one ecologically integrated process of processes. ~ Dana Wilde